Today, a variety of different bookbinding systems can deliver professionally bound documents, including books, manuals, publications, annual reports, newsletters, business plans, and brochures. A bookbinding system generally may be classified as a commercial (or trade) bookbinding system that is designed for in-line manufacturing of high quality volume runs or an in-house (or office) bookbinding system that is designed for short “on-demand” runs. Commercial bookbinding systems generally provide a wide variety of binding capabilities, but require large production runs (e.g., on the order of thousands of bindings) to offset the set-up cost of each production run and to support the necessary investment in expensive in-line production equipment. Office bookbinding systems, on the other hand, generally involve manual intervention and provide relatively few binding capabilities, but are significantly less expensive to set up and operate than commercial bookbinding systems, even for short on-demand production runs of only a few books.
In general, a bookbinding system collects a plurality of sheets or signatures into a text body (or book block) that includes a spine (or backbone) and two side hinge areas. The bookbinding system applies a flexible adhesive to the text body spine to bind the sheets together. A cover may be attached to the bound text body by applying an adhesive to the side hinge areas or the spine of the text body, or both. The cover of a typical commercial soft cover book generally is attached to the text spine. The covers of perfectly bound hardcover books and some soft cover “lay flat” books, on the other hand, typically are not attached to the text body spines (i.e., the spines are “floating”).
Traditionally, the copy for covers of short on-demand runs of perfectly bound books have been created manually by a graphic artist or a typesetter. In this regard, the graphic artist or typesetter manually formats the cover for the book, places the title on the cover, and reconfigures the original document to fit the desired final book size. In this process, the graphic artist or typesetter typically determines the size of the cover, including the spine area, so that the cover will wrap around the document perfectly. In general, this traditional manual bookbinding process involves a substantial amount of labor and time.
Recently published International Patent Publication WO 01/00423 describes a system for automating the creation of a printing master and a template for a cover that is sized to wrap around a document to form a perfectly bound book. The system prepares the document for binding by setting up page-by-page printing instructions, scaling the document (if required), and setting up a template for the cover. The system sets up printing instructions for the document by collecting instructions for each page “range” in the book. The operator of the system may specify the type of paper to be used for each of the page ranges and the printing format. After the page range printing instructions have been specified, the system determines the size requirements for the cover based on the size of the original file and the thickness of the document, which is based on the type of paper used and the number of pages involved for each type of paper. The system scales the text and page size to fit within the cover. The operator may print the scaled document file to form the internal pages of the book and the cover template file to form the cover of the book. Before the operator prints out the cover, however, the operator must edit the cover template file manually in order to add such items as the title, the author's name and graphical content to the cover.